We Are All Connected

Electronic musician John Boswell's project The Symphony of Science sets scientific knowledge to music, exploring our relationship with one another and with the universe.

posted Jan 25, 2010

Combining his love of science and music, musician John Boswell uses the audio processor Auto-Tune to sample lectures, television shows, and interviews with scientists.

In "We Are All Connected," Boswell remixes the words of Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Bill Nye, and Neil deGrasse Tyson with music and images from sources including Powers of Ten, Stephen Hawking'sUniverse, and Cosmos. It is one of four videos in the Symphony of Science project, which combines scientific knowledge and philosophy with music. His first video, "A Glorious Dawn," went viral on YouTube in the fall of 2009.

Lyrics

Neil deGrasse Tyson:
We are all connected;
To each other, biologically
To the earth, chemically
To the rest of the universe atomically

Richard Feynman:
I think nature's imagination
Is so much greater than man's
She's never going to let us relax

Carl Sagan
We live in an in-between universe
Where things change all right
But according to patterns, rules,
Or as we call them, laws of nature

Bill Nye:
I'm this guy standing on a planet
Really I'm just a speck
Compared with a star, the planet is just another speck
To think about all of this
To think about the vast emptiness of space
There's billions and billions of stars
Billions and billions of specks

Carl Sagan:
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it
But the way those atoms are put together
The cosmos is also within us
We're made of star stuff
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself
Across the sea of space
The stars are other suns
We have traveled this way before
And there is much to be learned
I find it elevating and exhilarating
To discover that we live in a universe
Which permits the evolution of molecular machines
As intricate and subtle as we

Neil deGrasse Tyson:
I know that the molecules in my body are traceable
To phenomena in the cosmos
That makes me want to grab people in the street
And say, have you heard this??

Richard Feynman:
There's this tremendous mess
Of waves all over in space
Which is the light bouncing around the room
And going from one thing to the other
And it's all really there
But you gotta stop and think about it
About the complexity to really get the pleasure
And it's all really there
The inconceivable nature of nature

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John Boswell is a musician based out of Washington state. In January 2010, he released the electronic music project Colorpulse.